When The Legend Becomes Fact: Avengers #1 Review

Editor’s Note: It was the spark that started the fire — a legend that grew in the telling. Some believe it began the moment Spoilers were rescued from a dying universe…

Before you ask, no, I don’t know who all those people are. The floating chick on the left is an incarnation of Captain Universe (who I remember from Micronauts comics when I was a kid), and if I had to hazard a guess based on the nuclear symbol on the team diagram, the dude on the right apparently flying in an effort to escape the fire pouring out of his ass is Nuke from Squadron Supreme. But there are at least four people on that last page I couldn’t pull out of a lineup if my life depended on it.

So now that we have the fanboy gymnastics out of the way, we can actually talk about Avengers #1.

First of all, there is no doubt that this is no longer Brian Michael Bendis’s Avengers. From the opening pages implying that “Previously in Avengers” was a cataclysm of cosmic creation, followed immediately by the representation of the Avengers lineup by an abstract diagram, this issue is a shot across the bow that this is indeed Jonathan Hickman’s Avengers. And that means that, after years of stories that seemingly always hinged around a bunch of guys shooting the shit around the kitchen table, we are in for something very different.

And that is not a bad thing. At least not yet. But we might get there.

New Avengers! Well, Not “New Avengers”, But New Avengers! New Old Avengers! Third Base! Screw It, Here’s A Trailer

Marvel’s first post-Bendis issue of Avengers, written by Jonathan Hickman and drawn by Jerome Opena, will be in comic stores tomorrow. But is Marvel taking it easy and banking on the fact that the pre-Marvel Now version of the book was one of their bigger sellers, or that its being written by one of their A-List creators, or that it shares the name with a near-billion dollar movie that just came out just six months ago to sell the thing? Fuck no; that would be lazy. Besides, why rest on your laurels and prior achievements when you’ve got motion comics algorithms, a microphone with a dude with a semi-deep voice, and possibly and purely by speculation a pile of pure flake cocaine burning holes in your pocket and / or nose (if you believe the rumor that I made up just now)?

Stack on top of those assets about 15,000 comic Web sites looking for something cool to talk about on a lazy night before New Comics Day, and it means that Marvel’s created a trailer for Avengers #1, which you can check out after the jump.

Who Wants To Be An Avenger? Jonathan Hickman’s Avengers Lineup Revealed

We’ve known for quite some time that Brian Michael Bendis’s run on the various Avengers titles was coming to an end, and it was recently announced that current Fantastic Four writer Jonathan Hickman was going to be taking over the two main titles, Avengers and The New Avengers. But one of the burning questions leading into the transfer of power has been: after the Avengers Vs. X-Men event shakes out and Hickman takes over, who’s gonna be on which team?

Well, some of those questions have been answered, as Marvel has released the first three covers to Avengers, written by Hickman with art by Jerome Opena, picturing a pretty big gathering of superheroes (and, as did Pinocchio, I question the correct term for a gathering of multiple superheroes. For today, I will eschew “gaggle” and “pride,” and will go with “wad.”):